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There are a host of applications that can help businesses bridge the gap between exploding app use by their customers and their now inadequate systems for customer relationship management, writes Ankur Jain of Nexus Venture Partners. Flurry, for example, delivers basic CRM metrics. Urban Airship can help with push notifications. Crittercism goes beyond crash-and-bug reports to app performance management. And AppBoy's dashboard is useful for push notices and analytics. Finally, consider Helpshift "for in-app customer service, support, and marketing."

Related Summaries

Twitter's live broadcasting platform Periscope now has an Android application for users with Android 4.4 or higher. The app has all the features available for iOS plus a few new ones, including finer control over push notifications.

Appboy has unveiled its Intelligent Delivery technology designed to help marketers use data for more efficient push messaging, as well as in-application messages and targeted e-mail campaigns. "Whether you have 100,000 or 50 million users, Intelligent Delivery assures the optimal time of delivery for each individual user, removing the pressure from marketing teams to determine the most effective time to send a message," Appboy's Mark Ghermezian said.

Appboy is offering game developers on the Unity platform the option of using its user targeting and engagement tools. Tools include push notifications, e-mail, in-application news feeds and customer support.

Marketing specialist Appboy is adding location-based features to allow more precise and timely targeting and enhance marketing analytics. The addition is part of Appboy's move toward allowing marketers to take action on the data it collects. "We've found that having a baseline of data that isn't crazy complicated and doesn't require data scientists to collect and understand is great. But being able to take that information and using it to engage with a person in some way is really where the value is," said Appboy's Cezary Pietrzak.

In-application messaging is on the rise among marketers and developers looking to overcome some of the deficiencies of push notifications. Unlike a push, which often suffers ill-timed delivery, in-app messages hit users when they open an app and "they support more feature-rich content, like images, links and longer copy," appboy strategist Spencer Burke says. Starbucks, for example, has "mastered in-app messaging to send out coupons and offers in addition to recommending apps and iTunes downloads," Lauren Johnson writes.